American Lightning

by Howard Blum

  Billy went block by block, from house to house. He could not find anyone who had rented a room to any of the three men. Where did I go wrong? he asked himself. What did I miss? He had a strong intuitive conviction that he was on their trail, following their footsteps, but somehow they had managed to elude him. All he could do, he wearily resolved, was retrace his steps.

  Billy returned to the vacant lot and for the second time that day set out to inspect the surrounding streets. He turned a corner, and this time he focused on something he had previously ignored. It was a deserted house. Peeling paint, shutters hanging at angles, windows punched out. He might as well see what was inside.

  The front door opened with a push. The floorboards creaked with each step he took. Under the stairwell, he found a door that led to the cellar. It was a cave of shadows. A strong smell of mildew rose up in his nose. He kicked at piles of dirt and rubble but found nothing.

  He headed back up the stairs and made a room-by-room inspection of the first floor. He entered each room slowly, not knowing what to expect. Every new step was a decision. It was easy to imagine that someone—or no less likely, three men—were hiding, waiting to jump him. But there was no one. The rooms held only the dust and dirt of abandonment.

  Billy went on to the second floor, still cautious, still attentive to every stray sound. He entered one room. Empty. Then another. Empty. But as he stepped into a back room, he saw something: a canvas tarpaulin covering a pyramid of wooden boxes.

  With that discovery, he abandoned any pretense of stealth. He rushed ahead and pulled off the tarpaulin. He counted ten boxes. Each one displayed the name of the Giant Powder Works and was stamped DANGER! EXPLOSIVES.

  With great caution, he opened each box. Eight of them held sticks of 80 percent dynamite. The remaining two were empty. Based on the contents of the other boxes, Billy calculated that forty-eight sticks were gone. That was enough to make three bombs. One for the Times Building. Another for Otis’s house. And a third for the M&M secretary. He had found the bomb factory.

  But where were the bombers? There was not a trace of them anywhere in the house. It was as if they had vanished. Nothing had been left behind.

  But then, Billy realized he was mistaken. They had left two clues. There was the dynamite—only he had already exhausted that lead. And there was the canvas tarpaulin. What could a piece of canvas tell him? he wondered.

  Billy held the tarpaulin in his hand, absently running his fingers over the fabric. He was concentrating, not knowing precisely what he was attempting to discover. And then he understood. The canvas was stiff to his touch. Stiff as new. It had just been purchased. He needed to locate the store where it had been sold. Perhaps he’d learn something that would put him back on the trio’s trail.

  Assisted by a task force of San Francisco police, the next day Billy made inquiries at stores throughout the city. The police had the descriptions of the three men and asked the store owners if they could recall selling a tarpaulin to someone who bore a physical resemblance to any of the trio.

  In a hardware store off the Embarcadero, the owner remembered selling canvas to a man who fit the swarthy Morris’s description. Only he had called himself William Capp. And Capp had had the canvas delivered. The address was 1565 Grove Street.

  Billy hurried to the address. It was a rooming house. Billy found Mrs. Lena Ingersoll, the landlady, and introduced himself. She had never met a celebrity before and became very enthusiastic. She was eager to help. She wanted to be part of something larger and more significant than her daily routine.

  Only she insisted no William Capp had ever lived in her house.

  But the canvas was delivered here. We were given the address, Billy challenged. He tried not to sound desperate.

  Don’t know about any canvas, the lady said.

  There was an odd coyness in her voice. And now Billy understood. She was taunting him, another civilian trying to demonstrate that she, too, could play detective. He let her go on.

  ’Course, she said, there was a David Caplan who had roomed here. She had been sure he was up to no good. That’s why, the landlady explained, she’d kept a real good watch on him and his friends.

  You should be the detective, not me, Billy congratulated her. If she wanted praise, he’d give it. He needed to learn what she knew.

  It took some time, but she shared everything. Two friends were always visiting this Caplan. There was a ruddy-faced man who Billy was certain was Leonard. And a taller man who resembled Bryce. She even knew the rooming house down the street where Bryce had rented an apartment.

  Maybe you want to hire me? she asked Billy as he was getting ready to leave.

  Let me think about that, he said politely. And with a tip of his derby hat, he hurried off.

  It was the San Francisco police who gave Billy the rest of the information he needed. They had a file on David Caplan. He was a well-known anarchist; and further cause for law enforcement’s concern, his wife was a relative of the country’s most famous trouble-making anarchist, Emma Goldman. Once Caplan was identified, Leonard’s real name was revealed, too. He was Caplan’s friend, another anarchist, by the name of M. A. Schmidt. Everyone called him Schmitty. Bryce—or Bryson?—however, was more of a mystery. He had left the rooming house about the time of the bombing in Los Angeles without leaving a forwarding address. All Billy could discover was that he had bought a train ticket to Chicago.

  The case was suddenly moving forward, but Billy felt no sense of triumph. The truth was, he was more perplexed than when he had arrived in San Francisco. This was not what he had expected.

  There was nothing to connect Otis to the bomb-makers.

  Organized labor also seemed not to be involved.

  But why would anarchists want to bomb a train yard in Indiana and a newspaper office in Los Angeles? The bombs were too similar to be a coincidence. And where would anarchists get the funds to finance such a widespread terror campaign? And what about McGraw, the mystery man who had bought the dynamite in Indiana? Where did he fit in? Was he the mastermind?

  Adding to his concern and bewilderment, another bombing occurred. This one was in Milwaukee. A coal storage facility had been blown up. Billy sent his men to investigate, but for now he could only wonder if it was also the work of anarchists. If in fact it was anarchists he was really chasing.

  Billy did not have the answers to any of his questions, but he was determined to find them. He told his son Raymond to try to pick up Bryce’s trail in Chicago. He would go after the two anarchists, Caplan and Schmitty. If he found them, perhaps they would lead him to the person in charge.

  The next evening Billy slipped out of the city. He made sure no one was following him, and then he boarded a train to Tacoma, Washington.

  NINETEEN

  ______________________

  BILLY’S DESTINATION WAS a hardscrabble settlement of cabins scattered about the woods circling the icy blue waters of Carr Inlet, just off Puget Sound. This was the Home Colony. In 1898 the Mutual Home Association had bought up 217 acres of rural land in the Pacific Northwest “to assist its members in obtaining and building homes for themselves and to aid in establishing better social and moral conditions.”

  For Home’s twelve hundred inhabitants, “better social and moral conditions” meant a free-spirited, utopian anarchism. It was a communitarian philosophy that opposed private ownership. Instead, property should be collectivized, shared by all members of the community, and distributed freely and equitably. Government, the residents of Home believed, was evil, a force that restricted freedom and self-interest. Their universal credo: The state should be overthrown.

  Caplan’s wife lived in the settlement. Schmitty, according to police reports, had often been observed there, too. The two men would feel safe, even protected, among their fellow anarchists, the detective predicted. Until Billy Burns surprised them.

  Billy despised anarchists. In his long career he had arrested murderers, thieves, swindlers, and crooked politician
s, but he had a singularly deep, visceral hatred for anarchists. He thought they “lived without any regard for a single decent thing in life.” “They exist in a state of free love, are notoriously unfaithful to their mates thus chosen, and are so crooked that even in this class of rogues there does not seem to be any hint of honor.” That is, their way of looking at the world directly challenged his orderly, patriotic, churchgoing, monogamous, achieving middle-class life. And that, he knew with unshakable certainty, was an unforgivable crime.

  Not that Billy had ever conversed in any meaningful way with an anarchist or, for that matter, read any of the movement’s contentious pamphlets or wishful treatises, all widely distributed at the turn of the century. His knowledge came from less authoritative sources. After the Haymarket Riot in 1886 and the assassination of President McKinley in 1901, the vilification of anarchists as bomb-throwers and assassins, as unscrupulous foreign agents preparing to engage in any manner of violence to destroy the social order, was standard shrill fare in the popular press. The more unspeakable the crime, the greater the certainty with which newspapers would point at “the red nihilists” as the chief suspects.

  Anarchists were stock villains in the movies, too. In The Voice of the Violin D.W. had cast a clique of bulging-eyed, wild-haired, foreign-looking political schemers to play the bad guys. Yet the plot of this 1909 one-reeler was grounded in melodrama, not radicalism: A hapless violin teacher is recruited into a bomb conspiracy—only to learn to his horror that the target is the father of the student with whom he has fallen in love. To save the girl, he must risk his own life by betraying a cell of dangerous and vindictive anarchists. In the end, love prevails. This was the film’s only message. Politics was an irrelevancy. Anarchists, in the director’s calculations, were simply an easy plot device. They were seedy stock characters that audiences would rise up and root against as soon as they appeared on the screen. They were perfect foils for his heroes.

  Darrow, as in most things, had a more nuanced outlook. He thought that anarchists were perceptive when they argued that government was evil because it reined in individual liberties. And he agreed that wealthy special interests—railroads, capitalist organizations like the Merchants and Manufacturers Association—had unjust powers that allowed them to manipulate workers’ lives at will. But his hard-fought life in the courtroom had made him too much of a pragmatist ever to become a true believer. “I think you folks are right—but not altogether right,” he had chided in his mocking way at an anarchist rally in Chicago. “Your idea of free associations would have worked in a handicraft stage of society like we had in Kinsman [Ohio] when I was a boy, but you fail to take into account the growing machine age.”

  But not even the anarchists in the Home Colony were of one mind on all issues. By the winter of 1911, when Billy headed north to hunt for Caplan and Schmitty, the inhabitants had dissolved into two feuding factions: the “nudes” and the “prudes.” At issue, the focus of much earnest debate, were such lofty philosophical concepts as “individual freedom” and “group responsibility.” The galvanizing incident, however, was more mundane. The nudes had gone swimming in the inlet without their bathing costumes. This libertine excess so outraged the prudes that they reported the nudists to the county authorities. Squads of wide-eyed police descended on the colony, and the offenders were arrested and summarily jailed. When Jay Fox, the editor of The Agitator, the colony’s paper, wrote an editorial defending a person’s right to swim in the nude, he was charged with encouraging “disrespect for the law.” He spent two months in jail. Billy thought the sentence was too lenient.

  The detective entered the colony disguised as a hunter. Instead of his customary derby, he wore a peaked hat with flaps that covered his ears. His Chesterfield topcoat was replaced by a hip-length red and black plaid jacket. According to the cover story he had quickly invented, he was hoping to bag some venison for his family’s table.

  He hadn’t come alone. The colony was as big as some cities, and the woods offered plenty of places for a resourceful man to hide. From the first day, he had deployed a team of his veteran operatives as backup. They went around with maps and surveying equipment; if anyone asked, the vague explanation was that they were working on a county engineering project.

  Billy’s plan was simple. First he’d locate Caplan and Schmitty. He’d spot them in the colony; or he’d bribe a greedy anarchist to give them up; or paying no mind to federal laws about the privacy of the U.S. mail, he’d intercept a letter sent to Caplan’s wife, or to his good friend Jay Fox, the radical newspaper editor, that would disclose where the men had gone to ground. Then Billy would “rope” them.

  “To rope a man is to gain his full confidence,” Billy would explain. “And that is even better than an arrest.” If he could rope Caplan and Schmitty, get them scared enough to cooperate with him, then they’d lead him to the man in charge. For Billy had become convinced: “The dynamite outrages all over the country were directed from some headquarters and by some master mind.” But from where? And why? Who was behind this terrorist scheme? He hoped to find a piece of information in the colony that would send him farther along on the trail.

  But the detective soon realized that his plan was in danger, and that he was the problem. After only a few days traipsing around the woods and making small talk at the general store, Billy appreciated that his hunter’s disguise was unconvincing. He was uncomfortable playing the role of a pudgy, middle-aged woodsman. And he looked ridiculous, like a plaid tea cozy, he conceded. The chances of his cover being blown, of someone’s staring too long at his absurd getup and finally recognizing the well-known detective, were too great. He decided to withdraw to a warm hotel room twenty miles away in Tacoma and let his operatives continue the investigation in the colony. He insisted, however, that they report to him daily in writing.

  Assistant Manager C.J.S. reported:

  Today at 7:30 A.M., in company with Investigator H.J.L., we proceeded to acquaint ourselves with conditions surrounding Home Colony and its residents.

  Our pretext as surveyors permitted us to move around without attracting attention. We found that a number of the community occupy residences in places isolated in the timber and not easy of access. We located the residence of Jay Fox, who is supposed to be connecting with Caplan . . . we found numerous places where Caplan could remain in safe hiding.

  Assistant Manager C.J.S. reported:

  Today at 7:30 A.M., in company with Investigator H.J.L., I took up a surveillance on the residence of Jay Fox . . .

  Assistant Manager C.J.S. reported:

  Today at 7:00 A.M., having learned that the Anarchists were to hold a meeting in Tacoma to commemorate the Hay-market Riot in Chicago . . . I watched the departure of the Home Colony contingent on the 8:00 A.M. boat . . . It was decided that I proceed by launch . . . I then proceeded to where the Anarchists’ meeting was being held . . . I did not see Fox. Neither did I see anyone answering the description of Caplan depart from the hall. At 11:45 P.M. I discontinued.

  H.J.L. reported:

  I resumed investigation here today at 7:00 A.M. covering the outgoing boat to Tacoma to ascertain whether Fox sent out any mail . . .

  The lady who handled the letters for Fox on the steamer Monday was Mrs. B, an English woman, who lives on a remittance and also writes for the magazines. She has a husband here. They are divorced. She rents a house here, and stays two or three days out of the week here, and while here, she and others of the “free love” faith hold a drunken carnival.

  The Jewish tailor, F., is pretty sore at the Fox family and might have some information.

  Investigator H.J.L. reported:

  We are getting acquainted very nicely, going along very slowly and feeling our way and the cover is first class. We have created no suspicion . . . I have become acquainted with the three store keepers, all friendly and will talk.

  For weeks the undercover investigation dragged on. And each day, or so it seemed to a restless Billy, he received anoth
er telegram from the Chicago office reporting a new bombing. There had been explosions in Springfield, Illinois; French Lick, Indiana; Omaha, Nebraska; and Columbus, Indiana. Billy wanted to believe he was on the trail of the masterminds and that his men in the colony would at any moment inform him of the arrests of the two anarchists. But the string of new bombings frayed his confidence. He grew impatient. And scared. What have I missed? he asked himself. Is this a fruitless diversion, or am I still on the right trail? There were nights when he could not sleep. If new explosions caused more deaths, he knew, they would be his responsibility, the results of his mistakes. And the nation would curse his name.

  TWENTY

  ______________________

  IN TACOMA, BILLY was growing tired of waiting in his hotel room. He needed to keep busy. When the local police chief told him there had been labor troubles up in Seattle the previous summer and that a building had been blown up in August, Billy decided to investigate. He had no reason to believe the Seattle explosion was tied in any way to the ones in Los Angeles and Peoria. “Not even a hunch,” he would later admit. It was just that his men were in the Home Colony while he sat indolently in his room reading their reports. This inactivity gnawed at his sense of his own importance. This was the greatest case of his career, a mystery the entire nation was waiting for him to solve. He wanted to be the detective who uncovered the telltale clue and broke the case. He had to play an active role.